I'm sure you got this "personal" mail from some digital curator from LinkedIn on how you can creatively use hashtag to get more audience. I got one too! Thanks for the advice, Dan!

If you look at their curveball page you'll see many fell prey to this cool suggestion (that was sent out to most of you). Did you too fall prey?

But wait...

1. Hashtag Career Curveball and lose your audience!

Well, #careercurveball - yes, I'm following your suggestion, Dan! is a good topic and also trending topic but here's my experience on hash tagging in the past. I also posted a picture since I sincerely hope to get a lot of people to follow me! Please follow me and recognize me!

Last time I used an app with tons of hashtags and got instant review from my friends and followers. "Stop hashtagging", many just quietly put me on the mute. I will never win them back.

#Advice: #Please #be #careful #with #excessivehashtagging !

2. Sharing value - Junk content or real experience?

LinkedIn obviously stands to gain a lot from all this mass content rush to their platform. With millions of publishers on their platform, this strategy stands to play out well, I guess. But what if the content is junk? Take a look at their career curveball page, do you like all of it?

Well quite obvious the more career discussions that take place, the more interaction will lead to you connecting with your network. LinkedIn obviously will also gain as discussion will be about jobs, right? And they can make this a place which you can pitch by pumping up all those massive big-data numbers to HR of all the companies.

#Advice: #share #professional #content #and #not #arbitrary #posts. #share #about #your #professional #content #not #what #someone #else #suggests #what #you #should #do

Too much hashtag overload? But seriously there are some areas where LinkedIn could improve. Let's start by some god things this platform offers...

Things LinkedIn platform offers

• Instant Publishing - You can blog here instead of setting up your whole blog and maintaining it. Easy and fast. Good, right? It's free and saves you time and money.
• Reach - You can apparently communicate with all 300 Million professionals.
• Impress your boss and friends - By writing cool stuff you can really impress your boss and friends.
• Impress future employers - Not sure if job seeking and job acquisition really happens on LinkedIn, but you can hope that the HR, Recruiters (in-house and externals) and others could potentially take notice.
• Fake feeling of importance - Wow, all those hundreds of followers in one day? They are your connections, silly. They didn't choose to follow you. LinkedIn did that for you. You should earn followers peers and not inherit them.

Honestly, I can't think of any other reason what this "free blogging platform" has to offer :\

Things LinkedIn platform doesn't offer

• Cannot use/paste custom code - This platform is technically very restricted. You can't try coding here. You can't try javascript or any other cool stuff here.
• Image resolution limitation - I got advice to post pictures. But I make diagrams and matrices on Omnigraffle. I show depth to my readers and followers. I make infographics regularly. Too bad they are of poor quality.
• Slideshare plug shows weird charecteristics - We understand that LinkedIn wants to tie its investments and sub-products to provide a unified experience to users (I hope so at atleast ). Sometimes the infographic is embedded neatly and sometimes it just is way to hazy for users to view on their laptops/mobile devices.
• Are you really working on your personal brand? - I don't think so. On my blog - which is my signature brand, I can do variety of stuff. I can put and embed latest nifty code that gives me reach beyond imaginable. For instance, "Inline tweets" and "suggestive tweets" is one such example. I can view stats in detail, I can allow automation such as scheduling of tons of my series I write there. I can install latest and greatest themes to continue to provide my readers with UX they like. List can go on and on...Basically, a lot of stuff and it's all pushing my personal brand ahead.

In closing

Still, this is a beginning for LinkedIn, we are yet to see what happens when all 300 million people start publishing. If you're writing crap or just following some suggestions blindly then you are not following your intuition, your true feeling about what you have to say, your real life experiences that will get you real respect from peers. Do you want that?

Bottom line: If you're not sharing your professional insights on this platform, then you'd better stop because it might work against you.

How's that for a #careercurveballs #advice :)